In today's competitive world, every organization thrives to provide best output to consumers, users, or clients. To achieve this, organizations take various measures that include managing their internal knowledge. Effective management of the internal knowledge is a key factor in any organization's success because of various advantages associated with it. For example, effective knowledge management helps in improving the knowledge of employees or members in the organization. This knowledge improvement enables members to provide improved quality and quick output. Quick output increases the overall productivity in the organization and increases the profit. Similarly, better quality output helps the organization to provide better services or products as compared with the competitors. Better services and products in turn increase the organization's sales and profit margins.
Traditionally, members of an organization help in knowledge management by sharing valuable documents and knowledge tips with other members through e-mails and meetings. However, not all members make the effort of sending an e-mail or organizing a meeting. Moreover, a member who is willing to share the information will mostly share the information with people he/she knows only. As a result, the knowledge is distributed to limited members only. For instance, consider a scenario where a member is working on a long-duration project in a team of 10 members. The organization houses 1,000 employees and has offices in three locations. In such a scenario, the member will mostly share knowledge with the 10 members in his/her project and may not know who else in the organization might find the knowledge useful. To take care of these limitations, many organizations assign a team to manage knowledge within the organization. The members of the team are given the responsibility of collecting knowledge from members within the organization, storing the collected knowledge, and distributing the knowledge within the organization. Most of the tasks undertaken by the members of the team are executed manually. This knowledge management practice has a number of limitations such as it requires high manual effort, it is prone to manual errors, it is limited to a particular team/some members, and tasks are not completed because of team member's unavailability and limited access for organization members to the knowledge.
In light of the above-mentioned limitations, organizations are innovating and embracing new solutions for knowledge management. One such solution involves maintaining a central repository and allowing members to submit knowledge in the central repository and access knowledge from this repository. Accessing the repository usually includes searching relevant documents based on keywords and manually filtering the search results to identify relevant documents. This solution also has a number of limitations associated with it. For example, on one hand, the solution does not ensure that all existing knowledge is captured and entered in the knowledge repository. A member who has valuable knowledge may not submit the knowledge with the repository. On the other hand, the solution does not ensure that an enthusiastic member does not overload the repository with not-so-relevant information which other members might not find relevant. Also, distribution of the captured knowledge is limited because a member may not know what all knowledge is available in the repository. Also, keywords based searching and manually filtering results are effort intensive steps because of which members may shy away from accessing information from the repository.
In light of the above discussion, there is a need for a method, a system, and a computer program product for effectively managing knowledge within an organization.